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Kentucky guard Otega Oweh, who declared for the NBA Draft with an option to return next season, is ranked No. 77 on ESPN’s early draft board.
Only 59 players are chosen in the draft, and based on those projections, the chances of Oweh returning are extremely high.
On ESPN’s list, Koby Brea is 56, followed by Amari Williams at 63, Jaxson Robinson is No. 81, and Andrew Carr ranks 97 on the draft projection board.
Oweh can participate in the NBA Combine if he receives an invite, and has until May 28 to remain in the draft or return to Kentucky for a final season.
In his first season with the Wildcats, Oweh led the team in scoring (16.2 points per game) and scored 20 or more in 13 games. In two games against Oklahoma, his former school, Oweh scored 55 points and hit the game-winner in both contests.
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Oweh knows his best shot to make NBA money is to stay another year of college. If this was just 3-4 years ago he would be gone but things have changed for the better with athletes staying longer. If I remember correctly DJ Wagner and Aaron Bradshaw were considered one and dones and a shew in for lottery picks then college basketball happened and they weren’t as dominant as people once thought they were and this happens alot especially when a kid peaks his sophomore or junior year in high school.
If Oweh improves even just 2 more ppg on a better team he will shoot up to late first round conversations which would be great for him to get on a great team. Oweh has improved by at least 4-5ppg every year.
After a loss Adolph Rupp was quoted as saying, "these guys get paid to much to play that bad". Now that these kids can get paid in plain sight, they should be held to a different standard. They should be expected to play at a high level and win and if they don’t, they should be fired (told to hit the road). The word is Kentucky has spent between $12 and $17 million on the roster. If they can’t make a FF spending that kind of money, then they were all a bust. If I had my way all Universities would shut all sports and tell the entitled brats to go to work at McDonald’s. It wouldn’t take but a ONE year to straighten their asses out.
Come on back, Otega!!! U are already loved, and are the newest on a long list of legends in Big Blue history–so come on back for your last year and take us to the Promised Land, because, with this roster we are going to have, YOU, my friend, ARE THE DIFFERENCE-MAKER in KY being a legit CHAMPIONSHIP-WINNING contender!!! Without you, we have a roster that is definitely extremely talented, with raw athleticism, size, and skill, and definitely a team who is "Final-Four-caliber" and "Final-Four-capable". But there is a big difference between just making the Final Four, and then having the right pieces in place for your team to be able to actually get across that FINISH LINE!!! And with this roster as it currently stands, Otega is that difference-maker, right now, in my opinion, between just being able to reach a Final Four, and being able to go all the way……and don’t get me wrong, after all we have lived thru with KY BBALL since the WIS loss in 2015, I would take a Final Four right now!! KY needs another new banner in the rafters ASAP, and a Final Four in Year 2 of the Mark Pope era would give him some much-needed independence. But it would be a different level of independence if it was a championship banner instead of just a Final Four banner. I would take either one right now. But Otega is your difference-maker for next year’s team’s potential to reach that goal. He is that guy who will have the ability to take over a game for the team when the outcome is on the line, and the guy who will put the team on his back and drag them across the finish line. Oweh proved so much in just his one year, and with him, there is more to his value than what just his mere talent and skills are, or his stats–thru much of KY’s history, we have had teams with that one key veteran, or glue guy, (and sometimes two of them), but at least one, who brought the value that just can’t be measured in statistics or skills or talent level. U can look thru the many years of KY’s history and find the instances of the teams who have had this guy, and also years where we DIDNT have that guy, or COULD HAVE, or SHOULD HAVE. We have many more championships taken from us due to a combination of both BS and heartbreaking circumstances due to these kind of "glue-guys", "value guys", etc……I know u all long-time fans out there will appreciate a look thru memory lane—but think about where the 1954 team would have ended up had the "BIG 3" of Hagan, Ramsey, and Tsioropolous not been screwed by the NCAA and forced out of participation in the NCAA Tournament due to being the 1950’s version of "super seniors", a move of which would be laughable by today’s standards, and would call for a lawsuit against the NCAA. That 1954 team finished with a 25-0 record for their reg season, and had an avg margin of victory in each game of close to 30 pts, which is even higher than the 1996 team. Think about the 1970 team, which had the most amount of 100-or-more-pt-total-scoring games of any UK team in history, that lost to Jacksonville in the regional final for the chance to go to the Final Four, if they had had a healthy Mike Casey–they would have had a great shot at winning the championship, and at least making that Final Four, and giving Dan Issel the one chance he had at hanging a banner. Next, I still say that a fully healthy Sam Bowie for 3-4 years of college bball could have ended up maybe being the greatest player of all-time in the history of KY BBALL, for what he was projected at the time to be, coming out of high school, and then the player that he ACTUALLY WAS AT KY, for the time that he logged before the first of many injuries that cost him an entire career. A healthy Bowie with Turpin and Sky Walker could have won at least one or more championships in the run from 1980 to 1984, and still should have won one as it is in 1984, when they did make the Final Four, but if not for the infamous 3/33 debacle against Georgetown, lost their chance to beat Houston for the second time that year for all the marbles. That Georgetown game, I believe, is one of the most painful NCAA tournament losses of all-time for alot of fans who lived thru that era. The next 3 I will mention, are, for me personally, my most 3 heartbreaking KY losses of all-time: DUKE ’92, MICH ’93, and AZ ’97. Now, obviously, as we all know, ’92 DUKE is due more to Asshole shouldn’t have even been in the game anymore due to the infamous STOMP, so I’m not even gonna go into that. No other player in history before or since could have done that, and gotten away with it. Only he who I refuse to mention by name. And of course, u can throw in too, MASH not being in that game for the last 30 secs, when, while IN the game, had enabled KY to go dead-heat with DUKE. And that same circumstance plays in to the next year too in the MICH game: MICH’s star stays in, KY’s star goes out. And your difference is still only 3 pts in OT. But the REAL difference in that game that I think people forget goes back to my original point about your "glue guys/MVPs": Dale Brown was one of those many classic "glue guys", "heart-and-soul" of the team guys in ’92 and ’93, and he goes out of the MICH game late in the second half doing what Dale Brown always did: putting his blood and guts on the line for his team diving out of bounds for a loose ball, crashing into the press table and injuring his shoulder. GAME OVER. And I knew it as soon as it happened. He had been playing the game of his life up to that point, and thats one of those deals where maybe he is able to save KY in that OT when MASH fouls out. That was just one of those particular games where KY could not afford to have ANYBODY out, no matter who it was, and that team was deep as hell too, ppl forget, just about as deep as the ’96 team–and in some ways, even deeper. But regardless, the FAB FIVE was just the one team in college bball that year that was just damn near impossible for anybody to stop, even us, and they had played us to a DEAD-HEAT too, even with us at full strength. And Dale Brown was one of that team’s best on-ball defenders. So just an incredible amount of all those intangible things u need to win a game like that were lost when Brown went crashing into that table. I can still see that as clear as day too, just about as clear as the damn Laettner shot will always play in my head. But it was just so frustrating and agonizing at the time because everybody knew that year KY had THE BEST TEAM AND THE DEEPEST AND HIGHEST LEVEL OF TALENT OVERALL of anybody in the country–BUT when u looked at just 1-5, MICH probably had the most talented/skilled, most athletic, and most difficult starting five of anybody in the country to defend, and it probably extended to their sixth man too. MICH had nowhere close to the DEPTH of a KY, or even a UNC, a KAN, and some of the other teams in the tournament, but unfortunately, that year, they just had the best first 5-6 in the country of anybody in the damn country, and they proved it…….until Chris Webber called the infamous time-out against UNC. This game requires intelligence and game-awareness as well–and that very flukish circumstance in that area in the championship game cost the Fab Five a national title–one that they had earned up until that moment…..they had UNC beat, and UNC DID NOT have the best team in the country that year. They were really good now, don’t get me wrong. But I think KY would have handled them in the final had things gone better for us against MICH. It was like that MICH game was cursed somehow before it even began. It was similar to the GTOWN game in ’84 in one sense, because u knew KY had the best, most talented team of all in ’93 the same as they did in ’84, and in both seasons, they did not get a chance to play for the championship against a team they would have been solid favorites to beat, and in the case of the ’84 season, they DID BEAT. But the ’93 MICH loss was also just about as heartbreaking as DUKE had been the year before, just because fans had waited all year for another shot at a tournament run after the way ’92 had ended, and that ’93 team took us on such an unbelievable ride that we will never forget–and an absolutely DOMINATING one, as well–especially in both of the tournaments. For me, they were just about as much fun to watch as the 1996 team was, and they seem to be forgotten, for some reason, by fans in going through the history of our teams. In my opinion, it was Pitino’s best, deepest, and most talented team at UK, second only to 1996. But now I’m gonna start sounding old, because there’s now like two generations of fans living who never saw Jamal Mashburn play–at least not LIVE, AT THE TIME. Maybe some ppl have pulled up old game videos of him online. But to see him play AT THE TIME, and to see what he looked like when he arrived here, and then what Pitino developed him into by the end of his career–he was an unstoppable force. He played with everybody from Reggie Hanson and the Unforgettables to Travis Ford and Tony Delk. His freshman year he helped turn Reggie Hanson into a tall, skinny, lanky, enforcer who could go toe-to-toe inside with any of the best big men in the SEC, and he always saved his best performances for Shaquille O’Neal!! And in turn, Reggie introduced a puffy, overweight, young, inexperienced kid to Rick Pitino’s bball empire–at the time, really a state-of-the-art ahead-of-its time system–Pitino set the tone for the new modern era of college bball which involved running up and down and playing the game of bball full-court–and doing EVERYTHING that way–running, shooting, passing, jumping, dunking, pressing, trapping, rebounding, playing defense, high-fiving, chest-bumping, and having a good time! But the key to all of that was that u had to perform in practice every day, and work hard on your own on your game, in all those same ways! And that’s what MASH had to learn when he got to KY, and it took him awhile. And that’s what the Unforgettables taught him his freshmen and sophomore years, as they were going thru the wars of the SEC–3 full years of that SEC gauntlet before one postseason game was played. Those KY players sacrificed as no others ever have. And they all did it for the love of this program and the love of this state. And that’s why their nickname, and that’s why all of their jerseys hang in the rafters of Rupp Arena. UK did, however, get one wrong when they left out Reggie Hanson as part of the jersey retirement for the Unforgettables–he originally came in to KY with all of those other guys when they were all originally signed by Eddie Sutton–its just that he graduated one year earlier than the "Big Four". But he was just as much a part of bringing this program back as the rest of them. And it would have been very interesting to see what he would have done playing with them that next year in the postseason tournaments their first year eligible. That’s the tragedy of the story of what led to The Unforgettables in the first place: Reggie Hanson was robbed of his chance to play in the postseason with the other four guys because of graduating a year earlier. Sean Woods came in the year after Reggie, but the other 3 guys were all redshirted by Sutton their first year, so they spent 5 yrs at KY while Reggie spent 4.So he only got to play for Pitino for 2 years, while the others got 3. An honorable mention for this also goes out to Derrick Miller, who was mainly a part of the Eddie Sutton era, but played for Pitino only his first season, then graduated. But he played a huge hand in the success of Rick’s first team–The Bombinos. He was a dead-eye 3-pt shooter and an assassin on defense, coming up with steals, and on the press. Again, he was one of those who laid that very early groundwork for the future rise of the KY empire again years later. And so, Rick, in his first year at KY, goes and signs what became his legacy recruit at KY and what became the generational recruit for that era of KY in Jamal Mashburn. And Mashburn’s freshman year, he and Reggie Hanson and the rest of the Unforgettables, while still on probation and ineligible for any conference championship officially, goes on and wins the damn thing anyway, finishing 14-4, and 28-6 overall, and has T-shirts printed up that read SEC #1 CATS BACK ON TOP!!! It’s still maybe the best rebuilding job in college bball coaching history. By the time Pitino year 3 of the reg season ended, Mashburn had taken a major leap with a second year of the Pitino system under his belt and so many other smart players around him who allowed him to put them on his back when they needed him, and when he wanted! That SEC Tournament run in ’92 is one of the great comeback stories I have ever seen in my whole life of watching KY BBALL–what they did to Alabama in that championship game was something to behold–and from that point on, Mashburn had become what Mashburn was, and IS. A leader. A grown man. I have never seen an internal motor like his, I never saw him get tired enough that he ever wanted to come out or didn’t have enough left in the tank, something I have never seen out of any other KY player I have watched. He was otherworldly, and a generational talent. Just as Dan Issel was in the late 60s, as Sam Bowie, Kenny Walker, and Rex Chapman were in the 80s, as Tayshaun Prince was at the turn of the century for the Tubby era, and as Anthony Davis/MKG/John Wall/Cousins/Karl Towns were for CAL in the 21st century, and then even after that–FOX, MONK, BAM, SHAI, PJ, Reeves– each era has seen its own small group of elite, individual greats. I could also throw Terrence Jones, Brandon Knight, and Julius Randle in there for the list of early individual CAL greats, as well as Keith Bogans, Jason Parker, Patrick Patterson, and Jodie Meeks for the Tubby era. Up until his last 3-4 years, Tubby recruited some strong individual talents, he just seemed to have trouble managing the individual superstars’ egos to buy into his "team-first" ideology–which, as u look back on it now, Tubby had the right ideas, it just came down to managing the egos and the lack of player control, but then the guys who wanted to stay and play for him, they ended up developing into nice, cohesive teams. The 2003 team is one of the most overlooked and forgotten in school history–they won 26 games in a row after getting blown out by LOU, swept the SEC reg season and tournament, and were a Keith Bogans ankle sprain away from giving Tubby his second Final Four. Which goes back to my long-ago original point to my novel here: the many times in this program’s history of countless injuries and circumstances that have been so costly to the chance of so many more accomplishments and more banners for this program’s illustrious successful history. Going back to MASHBURN for a second, when 1993 came, he had become a man that none of us recognized, and he and Travis Ford took that team on a run that whole season that nobody at that time had seen and one which rivals The Untouchables. But again, the biggest "what-ifs" for the DUKE and MICH games are what if MASH is actually IN THE GAME, rather than on the bench, in the final minute of those. In 1994, Rodney Dent tears his ACL, ends his season, and effectively ends the teams’, even though they probably wouldn’t have been Final 4-caliber even WITH him–but Dent was a tremendous individual talent, and maybe the most forgotten and overlooked of the entire Pitino era. At the time, that injury was waved off like it was no big deal, and a mentality of "this team will still be fine without him, he’s not that much of a difference-maker"…..so untrue. And it’s as if ppl don’t even remember him, which is really sad. Obviously, the one that EVERYBODY REMEMEBERS is Derek Anderson, which is the greatest "what-if" of all-time in KY BBALL history, only because of the history that was at stake–the 3-peat. And still without his services, 5 points away in OT from still pulling that off. After Pitino was gone, Tubby was dealt with a lesser degree of this "what-if" scenario with a lineup that could have been a dream one had it been allowed to play out, but with Tubby, u never knew what was going on in his mind. Prior to the start of the 2001-02 season, big man Jason Parker tears his ACL, and he was maybe the most talented player Tubby ever had here, other than Prince. So going into that season healthy, u would have been able to start Parker, along with Prince, Bogans, and probably Jules Camara, and then Tubby still had all the other guys who were part of that run in 2003: Cliff Hawkins, Erik Daniels Gerald Fitch, Chuck Hayes, and Marquis Estill (who was another underrated player here). All of those guys were from the beginning of the REAL Tubby era at KY, and they were all really good guys who just got into "young people"-type trouble, but never did anything like really bad. They were from the generation right after mine, so I got to know a few of them when I was going up there alot at the time for games and stuff, and they were all really cool, so I developed a real liking for them. But Tubby missed out on a golden chance at a dream lineup that season, as Parker’s knee injury kicked off a long sequence of events that eventually became known as "Team Turmoil". And that’s what made the run the next year so remarkable: they lose Prince, but go 32-4, sweep the SEC 19-0, and go to the Elite 8, but Bogans sprains his ankle. And BTW, I left out someone else who is at in the top of the list of Tubby recruits: Rajon Rondo–probably THE MOST forgotten Wildcat of all-time. And that was another one who almost got Tubby that second Final Four in 2005–the double-OT loss to MICH ST. And now, I finish with the CAL era: the last of Tubbys great recruits–Patterson and Meeks–I still say Jodie Meeks was the missing puzzle piece and the missing SHOOTER for CAL’s perfect first team at KY—those dudes had it all, and they absolutely had a BLAST playing ball, and their energy, intensity, and fun were absolutely contagious–they were just missing one thing: Jodie Meeks. The consistent outside shooting threat that was the cause of their doom against WVA in the Elite 8, which I still say might have been a bigger upset than WIS beating the 2015 team. I honestly think the level of talent, athleticism, size, skill, depth, and ability that CAL had on that first team might have been his best ever at KY. When u think about both Cousins and Patterson inside, plus Daniel Orton, then Wall and Bledsoe both at the guard position, plus u still had Darnell Dodson, Darius Miller, DeAndre Liggins, Josh Harrellson, Perry Stevenson, and Ramon Harris available on the bench –its a close comparison in terms of roster to 2015, and we could also get into the ways CAL chose or DIDNT CHOOSE to manage and develop his roster–thats why more fans don’t feel sorry for him than do with his one-and-done championship at KY, because he got all the talent in the world that he wanted for basically 8 yrs, and didn’t have really any of the same adversities that coaches from the past had in dealing with circumstances and injuries. U go back and look at his rosters now and look at who all he had here available, and then look at the NBA careers of all of them in the 10 yrs after, and u say, how could he have not won another title in 15 yrs’ time, or more so, how could he have not built deep, consistent teams here who were winners that turned a program into a perennial power, the same way Pitino did? And the first 5-6 years of his time here resembled that kind of empire to some degree–but it was still different, because fans knew CAL’s ultimate goal deep down was to turn out as many NBA draft picks as possible–and that rubbed ALOT OF PEOPLE THE WRONG WAY, AND RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING. But that first KY team of his needed a senior Jodie Meeks, badly, to be the dependable shooter for them, and to keep defenses honest–u throw Meeks on that team, then opponents have to choose whether to try to stop his shooting individially, or to try to deal with Wall and Bledsoe one-on-one out on the perimeter—so the threat of Meeks outside basically turns the backcourt into a playground for both Wall and Bledsoe, because who is stopping either of them one-on-one?? LOL If they try to drive and get in trouble, they can kick it out to Meeks who will be open and ready to shoot at all times, and then u have Cousins and Patterson inside to clean it up and rebound, and also provide additional bailout to either of the guards if they get in trouble driving to the basket. Plus, Meeks also had the ability to drive the ball to the basket himself! And if u recall, he was a fantastic FT shooter too, and what was another of that team’s struggles? FT shooting. Meeks would have THRIVED under CAL–especially "early-KY CAL", when he actually was a little more focused on coaching college bball, developing players and teams, and trying to win a championship. And there is no doubt in my mind that Jodie Meeks on that first CAL team: minimum Final 4, and at least IN the championship game playing DUKE for the title. Now, I will say, CAL had a couple of these major brushes with injuries to major players too that could have greatly changed the ability for him to get that second championship. Willie Cauley-Stein, u have to think would have greatly increased their chances of winning that championship in 2014 when he missed all those tournament games thru the Final Four. And I don’t think ppl give enough thought to the fact of the difference that Alex Poythress could have made to that 2015 team–at the time he went down, again, it was easy for everybody to say "we can get by without him" because of the talent and depth that we had. Well that came back to bite us in the Final Four, because I sure as hell know we needed him against Wisconsin!! He was always one, too, to come up the biggest in those biggest of tournament games, like against LOU in 2014–another of those "glue guys" who come up huge in the clutch moments! I think he could have been a huge difference maker for the 2015 team–there comes a time where u need your whole roster because nobody is going to go undefeated. And that was the original theme of my book here today. Thank you all for allowing me to take my trip thru memory lane, and anybody still reading this, GOD BLESS U! I am the "die-est of hards", because I was raised on this shit, and it is part of my blood, part of my history, part of my DNA, and part of my culture. I will say tho, I don’t think anybody is going to match our 38-1 record from 2015. Now that KING CAL is gone, the accomplishments of that year at least look a little better than they have up to now. It will continue to look better in time, once CAL is gone from bball and out of our bball viewing lives for good. However, I will say Mark Pope does have one demon from his first year that he does need to get exorcised this upcoming second season, the demon from FEB 1st, and that could be a part of what has made him build the kind of team and roster that he has been building. I am really excited about it, as it looks right now–it has Pitino-esque-type depth to it, as far as numbers, and the amount of guys with really high levels of athleticsm, talent, multiple skills, and versatility, which is something Pitino’s best teams had. And those are areas where we struggled with Popes first team, and in games like the ARK one, and others too, like Alabama and TN. I’m already looking forward to next season–I think it’s going to be a much better season and much better team, by far, than this past one.
Dude, good stuff, need to write a book or something with the long prose style you seem to prefer.
Jimmy must be upset because he had to work at McDonald’s. The NCAA has been making money on these boys handover fist for years now. It’s about time they get to share in some of the spoils . John Calipari made living for years only $9 million. I think when he left and he couldn’t run out of bounds play. If coaches can make that kind of money and move anytime they want to Was the players be allowed to? They’re the ones that make all the money for the NCAA not the coaches and they’re allowed to do whatever. People don’t go to the game to see a coach unless they’re kin to him.
You seem like the type that’s on welfare Troy. The average salary in the G-League is $40,500 per season. Two-Way contracts are worth $80,000 and $500,000 per season. Players that will never even see the G-League wanting $1,000,000 per college season is a joke. The ones dumb enough to pay it is a bigger joke, like you.
I am pretty sure Otega is coming back, really looking forward to next year’s team! Hope they gel together as a team! Was wondering if they can play a international team this summer, Canada or Puerto Rico to help them get used to each other!
Dude should have just got a book deal instead of writing that book for free that no one will read 😂